Queen Amid Ashes

This is one of the filler novellas sitting after Book#2 of the Sun Eater series. Hadrian Marlowe has been made a Knight of the Empire and given a high class space ship and sent off to mop up after a Cielcin invasion of a distant planet. The Cielcin fleet has been blown apart by Empire forces and their main worldship has disappeared into hyperspace.

He finds the planet devastated and the main city burnt to ashes. The Baroness who rules the planet is hiding with many thousands of her retainers and general population in underground tunnels.

It is when he is clearing out the remaining Cielcin that he makes a horrifying discovery and in that moment his whole purpose on the planet has changed. Hadrian has to take his newly given authority as a Knight of the Empire to an expected level as he seeks to give the planet a new future.

The story ends suddenly at the 75% mark and the rest is back-matter. There is a long history of the Marlowe dynastic line with a reference to the erroneous claim by some that they are descendants of Christopher Marlowe the English playwright of the 1500s. Coincidentally, Hadrian's new space ship is called the Tamerlane, similar to the original Marlowe's play 'Tamburlaine the Great'. Some characters in Hadrian's story are similarly named after characters in that play.

Other back-matter sections are various personae and a thesaurus of Ruocchio's terms.